Monday, monday....

Saturday...Cultural tour of Hong Kong, what could be cooler right??? WRONG...what a waste of money. It was a tour set up for the exchange student at CityU, but turned out to be BORING!! We had the option to choose cultural tour of Hong Kong or urban tour - the obvious choice is culture. If I want to see buildings and explore tall skyscrapers, I can do that on my own time...I'm not going to pay someone to show me that stuff. Okay now back to the tour, its 10 am, and everyone is so excited to get on this coach bus and see Hong Kong. Our tour guide (you can see her in my album in the little pink shirt), is beyond ecstatic and is talk talk talking away while we leave CityU. She points out little sites here and there, tells us that Jackie Chan's OFFICE is a block away from our school but he only comes about once a month. (really...that was all I needed to know, thanks for my cultural tour, I'm done now!!!) JK...So we drive through the new territories and see some of the night spots during the day (completely different scenery). Then we all took quick little naps as we hear we are taking a 2 hour hike once we park.

We wake up to the biggest paved hill ever and walk up to find a museum. It was the Heritage Trail Visitors Center (sorry but its NOT CENTRE..like it says on the brochure...and yes I know I'm not stupid HK was a British colony), and the Ping Shan Tang Clan Gallery. We walked through quite quickly and learned a little bit about the past rituals of marriages and other customs. Then we took a quick walk to some temples and looked around at the views. The bus picked us up around 1 and drove us to the Seafood Restaurant. We were served chicken, pork, oysters, shrimp with eyes and their skeleton, beef with celery, a cabbage that looks similar to bok choi, fish in lemon sauce, dry white rice, and tea. So far I'm sticking to the pork, fish, veggies, rice, and tea. We finished up lunch with the tradition of eating oranges. Apparently in Chinese culture it is rude to just ask for the bill, so instead people ask for oranges signifying the meal is coming to an end.

After lunch there was a seafood market which we walked down. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of it, but it was smelly and all raw seafood that was the same at each stand. Next time I'll take more pictures!! At the end of the market we reached the ocean, but not just any ocean, the ocean which leads to China. So we all squinted through the smog and saw some building outlines...hooray!! After this we were taken to some visitor center that had some bridges nearby. We didn't really learn anything about why we were taken there. After that it was home to get ready for Macau, oh wait, just kidding!! That tour wore so many of us out we all took naps and said we'd go to Macau another time. No point in wasting money when we are going to Thailand on Thursday!!

PICS FROM THE CULTURAL TOUR: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2562167&l=70887&id=6844049

After me and the girls (Jasmine who is like in all of my pictures, goes to S.F. State, Latora who studied in Ghana last semester, Sarah from Canada, and Audrey from IU)...went to Mongkok to find some food. After my excessive coughing and loss of voice we also decided to get me some medicine and hope I'd get better! After walking around Mongkok for probably half an hour ...we finally found a restaurant that was basically the most amazing food we'd all eaten so far. I had a shrimp and salmon caesar salad with french onion soup, others had spicy crab soup, a sandwich, and gourmet pasta. Everything looked so good on the menu it was really hard to choose. The desserts were the best looking but we were honestly stuffed from our meals that we decided we'd have to come back again. Next we went off to go bowling in Kowloon Bay with some other people including a Hong Kong local. A couple of us watched while a couple spared the night away...ha..ha. The night ended in great fun and we took the last MTR home and passed out softly and soundly.

Sunday I literally did homework, watched every possible show on MTV.COM, and slept all day. I was determined to get better and gain my voice back. I totally don't regret not going to Macau, it was a lazy day that I needed. So around midnight (between Sunday and Monday) I say goodnight to my parents, finish booking my hotel in Bangkok, and talk a little bit to friends back home. Get in my bed start watching a movie on my ipod touch :) ....realize at 4 a.m. I'm still up coughing...not okay!! sooo I change my alarm from 10:40 (my classes on Monday don't start till 12:30...) to 8 o clock, determined to go to the medical clinic....UGH!!!

So at 8 I wake up ....and head down to the clinic. Fastest doctor visit I've ever had. They doctor prescribed me 4 medicines (who knew I needed that much) and that was that. Medical care at CityU is great!!

Finally time for my first class, my IS class where I don't know a single soul, until today!! First I talk with the professor (which local students never do), then I meet a girl, Selina, from Shenzhen, China. She was really sweet and whenever someone was saying something in Cantonese, someone would translate. The class is pretty simple its all about logical algorithms and programing them into computers...the not so simple part is binary code, but we'll see how that goes.

Second class, time for Transportation Logistics. We had to get into groups and the professor encouraged all of the exchange students and local students to mix together. So I'm in a group with Matt (from Purdue), Luis (from Arkansas), and 4 guys from Hong Kong (Raphael, Kwan, Jerry, and Keenan). Seems pretty exciting...we'll see how it goes!

After class, met up with Jasmine to go to Taste (the "expensive" grocery store) to get some dinner. In the evening (guessing around 6), all of the fresh stuff (sandwiches, wraps, salads, sushi) goes on sale. It was a really rough decision on what to choose but I ended up going with the equivalent of a spider roll...and got some raspberries for dessert...yum!! We had back to Student Res to eat. I put wasabi on all of my rolls, biggest mistake of my life. Apparently wasabi in HK is about ...I don't know I'd guess 10 times as spicy as wasabi in the states. After already having an irritated throat from my cough the last thing I needed is to be coughing from wasabi. Lets just say my face was red and I couldn't stop coughing for a good 5 minutes...at least the cafeteria was loud :). Anyways, tomorrow is my friend Jasmine's 21st bday so we are all going out to celebrate, or rather I'm tagging along for a little bit since drinking is clearly not on my menu tonight. Everyone is really excited for Hong Kong and counting down the days...or rather hours!!

Miss the US a little bit.....(minus the weather of course). If anyone has any suggestions/comments/concerns for Thailand, let me know please :) razberries71@gmail.com